Long way home for Marine’s dog tag

Military dog tags serve a grim purpose, to identify the war dead. They are at once the most generic and personal artifacts of any veteran’s service.

Lanny Martinson lost his during the Vietnam War. On June 4, 1968, he was a 23-year-old Marine at Khe Sanh when his right leg was blown up by an enemy land mine. He came home after the amputation in a wheelchair, without his dog tags.

“I just figured they’d gotten rid of them when they ripped off my clothes to operate on me,” he said.

Martinson loved the Marines, wanted a career out of it. So even as that dream died, even as he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt — others died in the same minefield that took his leg — he didn’t regret his time in the military.

In fact, he’d finally decided he should order new dog tags when the phone rang recently at his house in Sugar Land, Texas, near Houston. The caller asked for his name and said, “I think I have something that belongs to you.”

It was one of his dog tags, found amid the overgrown remnants of the airstrip at Khe Sanh. Now, thanks in part to the efforts of a Chula Vista woman, the tag will soon be back in the hands of its owner, 45 years after it disappeared.

“Overwhelming,” Martinson said. “It’s like I left a part of me over there and somehow it’s made its way back to me from a dark place.” The welcome home that Vietnam vets never got after the war — he feels like he’s getting it now, Martinson said. It makes him cry.

It makes Tanna Toney-Ferris cry, too. She’s the Chula Vista woman, a Harley-riding wife of a Navy vet. She has a soft spot for the military and a knack for reuniting veterans with their lost dog tags. She’s done it two other times in the past seven years.

This time she had a lot of help, from a Vietnam War buff in Australia to a motorcycle mechanic in Glendora to legions of Marines on the Internet. Sometimes it really is a small world.

“A dog tag,” she said, “is the closest thing to any soldier’s heart.”

Spreading the word

For the past seven years, John Naismith has traveled from Australia with his wife to teach English to children in Vietnam for a nonprofit called Project Indochina. When he’s not in the classroom, his “keen interest” in the war takes him to battlefields and monuments.

About two years ago, he was at Khe Sanh, site of a famous, months-long siege in 1968. He visited a museum there and then walked over to what used to be the airstrip, now mostly covered with brush and trees.

“As I was walking through the undergrowth,” he said in an email, “I saw something bright shining in the sunlight.”

He brought the tag home. It had the last name “Martinson” on it and the initials L.P. It listed the service branch as USMC and the religious affiliation as Lutheran.